All posts tagged Hugh Dancy

Things aren’t going to end well for Hannibal Lecter’s psychiatrist “Hannibal.”

Dr. Bedelia Du Maurier (Gillian Anderson) has long known that her sole remaining patient is formidable in dark ways. She knows he’s “dangerous,” and she tells him as much. Yet his recent actions — following up on his insatiable obsession with Will Graham (Hugh Dancy), his “flirtation” with the FBI — have pushed her to the edge. She no longer wants Lecter (Mads Mikkelsen) as her patient, and she’s beginning to realize that he’s far more monstrous than she thought. Read More »

In case you’ve forgotten, the opening scene of “Hannibal” season two — a nightmarish brawl between Hannibal Lecter (Mads Mikkelsen) and FBI bigwig Jack Crawford (Laurence Fishburne) — should remind you that this incarnation of the cannibal psychiatrist is not what you’ve come to expect.

Whereas Anthony Hopkins played an incarcerated Lecter in the Oscar-winning “The Silence of the Lambs” with the predatory grace of the world’s evilest house cat, Mikkelsen’s free Lecter is a lion, with a regal mien and a powerful physique complementing his feline arrogance. And if you don’t like that, it’s merely a matter of, well, taste. Read More »

The gruesome “purple opera,” to borrow showrunner Bryan Fuller‘s term, was starved for ratings last year, but NBC renewed it since the critically acclaimed show was a hit on DVRs and it has a dedicated and growing base of avid fans known, fittingly, as “Fannibals.”

But you don’t have to be obsessed to get into “Hannibal.” You don’t even have to be that big a fan of “Red Dragon” or “The Silence of the Lambs,” although it helps to have a strong stomach and a sick sense of humor. Let Speakeasy help you prepare with our guide to season two: Read More »

As much as it hurts to say so, it had to end like this. Poor Will Graham (Hugh Dancy) is left friendless and behind bars, accused of murders he didn’t commit, while the real murderer, Dr. Hannibal Lecter (Mads Mikkelsen), is free and smirking with satanic delight. It’s a grim but perfect way to end the first season of Bryan Fuller’s “Hannibal.”

The episode begins in a fog of nightmarish inevitability, and it never relents. Will has run out of time. He can’t hunt down the Minnesota Shrike’s copycat killer because now he is the prime suspect after Abigail Hobbs (Kacey Rohl) never returned from their trip to Minnesota, and he can’t remember when they separated. He seals his fate after he vomits in his sink and finds Abigail’s severed ear there. Will’s supposed good friend and doctor, Lecter, can no longer pretend to want to protect the young FBI profiler. He has to protect himself, after all, and he’s built an elegant trap for Will.

Not only does Will have Abigail’s ear, but he has traces of her blood and tissue under his fingernails, and his arms sport defensive wounds. But wait, there’s more! Jack Crawford (Laurence Fishburne) and his crew find fishing lures made with tissue from the copycat’s murder victims: Cassie Boyle, Marissa Schur, Dr. Sutcliffe and Georgia Madchen. Will, of course, refuses to accept he killed all those people, even if he has been prone to blackouts and “lost time.” Perhaps he could believe that he killed Abigail, he says, because he was so deep into Garrett Jacob Hobbs’ mind and never really escaped. But the others? No. Read More »

Hannibal Lecter (Mads Mikkelsen) is a good and loyal patient in more ways than one. So when his psychiatrist, Bedelia Du Maurier (Gillian Anderson), tells him he shouldn’t be friends with Will Graham (Hugh Dancy) anymore, he follows through. Unfortunately for Will, though, losing Lecter as a friend means a lot worse things than unreturned phone calls or being unfriended on Facebook.

Poor Will’s fever might have subsided, but he still hasn’t gotten the straight diagnosis from Lecter yet, and he continues to suffer hallucinations and lost time. On top of that, his boss, Jack Crawford (Laurence Fishburne), doesn’t even know if he can trust his star investigator anymore. The death of diseased killer Georgia Madchen (Ellen Muth), with whom Will identified and sympathized because her mind was warped by reasons beyond her control, finally drives the profiler over the edge, leading him to make bold and bizarre connections between this death, the gruesome murder of Lecter’s colleague Dr. Sutcliffe, and the murders of the Minnesota Shrike copycat’s victims. It puzzles Jack and his crew enough to investigate, though. Read More »

The warped “friendship” between troubled and talented FBI profiler Will Graham (Hugh Dancy) and the secretly murderous Dr. Hannibal Lecter (Mads Mikkelsen) takes more twisted turns this week if this clip is any indication.

Will has been plagued by fever and worsening hallucinations thanks to a case of encephalitis, a diagnosis Lecter has hidden from him. It appears Will learns of his ailment in tonight’s episode, but Lecter, as is his wont, insists on keeping it secret from others, notably Will’s boss, Special Agent Jack Crawford (Laurence Fishburne).

There are only two episodes left in the season. Will this match made in Hell survive?

“I just feel like somebody else. … I feel crazy. … I fear not knowing who I am.”

Even though he thinks he’s losing his mind, Will Graham’s (Hugh Dancy) encephalitis is doing a number on him, and his visions are becoming more vivid, more surreal, more intrusive on reality: Clocks melt into puddles of water, massive waves sweep him away, and boss Jack Crawford (Laurence Fishburne), amid a thicket of antlers, accuses him of being crazy. He also experiences his most detailed and feral vision of a crime yet.

It comes as he investigates the escape of Dr. Abel Gideon (Eddie Izzard). Gideon is of two minds, according to Will. Is he still under the influence of Dr. Frederick Chilton’s (Raul Esparza) “psychic driving”? Is he trying to attract the attention of the real Chesapeake Ripper? If so, hanging his victims’ organs from tree branches might just do the trick. Or that he “scrambled” their brains, which is what, as Will points out, all his psychiatrists have done to him, including Alana Bloom (Catherine Dhavernas). Did Chilton coax Gideon into escaping? Gideon is suing him for convincing him that he was the Ripper, and Chilton lies to Will and Alana that Gideon told him he wanted to prove that he was the Ripper. Having Gideon escape and possibly get killed would indeed spare Chilton a lawsuit. Read More »

Before we get into tonight’s episode, it’s worth noting that just today NBC renewed “Hannibal” for a second season, according to the show’s official Twitter feed as well as several media reports. The renewal was in doubt as ratings have been weak, but critical buzz and a passionate fan base seem to have convinced the network that the grim, gory and all-around gonzo series deserved more time. Maybe we’ll get to see how series creator Bryan Fuller envisions Will Graham (Hugh Dancy) eventually figuring out Dr. Hannibal Lecter’s (Mads Mikkelsen) secrets, after all.

First, though, Will’s going to have to get his head together. The job’s getting to him, warping his mind to the point where he is losing track of reality and time. On top of all that, he’s burdened by covering up, along with Lecter, the fact that Abigail Hobbs killed Nicholas Boyle. “I feel like I’m fading,” he tells Lecter. As an exercise, the doctor has him draw a clock. We see Will pull it off perfectly, but when Lecter looks at the profiler’s scribbling, he sees a jumble of numbers. This, of course, calls into question much of what we’ve seen through Will’s eyes. Read More »

Will Graham is losing his grip on time, space, the very fabric of his temporal and psychological realities. He’s confused by the mutual affection with Dr. Alana Bloom, who admits to having feelings for him but won’t act on them because she thinks he’s “unstable.” He’s lecturing to empty classrooms. And one minute, he’s in West Virginia, observing a particularly horrible crime scene — a totem pole of rotted, hacked-up corpses topped off by a fresh one and surrounded by dug-up graves – the next he’s in Dr. Hannibal Lecter’s office. He doesn’t know how he got there, and the doctor is worried. Will is escaping his horrible empathy, and so he’s losing time, like, say, alleged victims of UFO abductions say they do. “I don’t want you to wake up and see a totem of your own making,” Lecter tells him.

Who’s behind the corpse totem? Whoever it is felt that the freshest victim, Joel Summers, was special. He’s the headpiece, after all, and his death signals that the killer is “coming out into the light” after years of acting as a “ghost.” The display tells a story, 40 years’ worth of unsolved killings, with a likely connection between the first and last victims, Will says. Read More »

Franklin’s friend Tobias (Demore Barnes) is a psychopath, sure, but he’s also a music aficionado and teacher. He, like Hannibal Lecter, enjoys the finer things in life, and murder serves to augment his tastes and craft. Instead of cuisine, however, Tobias likes to use human organs to make strings for string instruments. “Are they always made from cat guts?” a student asks Tobias. “Not always,” the killer answers as we see a montage of how exactly he makes the strings. Unsurprisingly, it’s not for the squeamish. Read More »

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Speakeasy is a blog covering media, entertainment, celebrity and the arts. The publication is produced by Barbara Chai and Jonathan Welsh with contributions from the Wall Street Journal staff and others. Write to us at speakeasy@wsj.com or follow us on Twitter at @WSJSpeakeasy or individually @barbarachai.